The Grabhorn Institute

Jamie Alexander is the owner/director of Park Life Store and Gallery in San Francisco which opened in 2006. He has been a patron of the Bay Area arts for over 20 years and has served extended time as a board member of Headlands Center for the Arts and Creative Growth (Oakland). Jamie is also the founder of the SF Art Book Fair. He studied Design and Social Ecology at University of CA Irvine.

Kim Anno is an artist, film director and producer. She has made two artists’s books with the poet Anne Carson, titled: Mirror of Simple Souls, and The Albertine Work Out. Currently, she is fabricating public art work for the San Francisco Airport and is in post-production on ¡Quba! a documentary on the LGBT Movement in Cuba. Anno founded the non-profit Wild Projects whose mission is “To collaborate world-wide through fearless art, film, and performance to inspire resiliency in the face of adversity.”

Ashwini Bhat, an artist born in southern India, currently lives and works in the Bay Area, California. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, she now works at the intersection of sculpture, ceramics, installation, and performance. Bhat is a recipient of the McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship and the Howard Foundation Award for Sculpture.

Alix Christie is an author, critic and journalist. She apprenticed as a printer to her grandfather, the late Lester Lloyd, the longtime foreman of Mackenzie & Harris, now M&H Type, as well as to James Robertson at the Yolla Bolly Press. Her 2014 debut novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She holds a B.A. from Vassar College and a masters of journalism from UC Berkeley and earned a M.F.A. in fiction from St Mary’s College of California. Christie is at work on a memoir and currently reviews books and arts for The Economist.

Amelia is the Acquisitions and Curatorial Support Coordinator at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. She has worked at numerous libraries and special collection in the Bay Area and the UK and is especially interested in the materiality and history of book making from early manuscripts through to contemporary artists’ books and concrete poetry.

Jennifer Morla is President and Creative Director of Morla Design, a multidisciplinary design firm located in San Francisco. With over 300 awards of excellence, her work has been recognized by virtually every organization in the field of visual communication. Jennifer lectures and judges internationally, has taught at California College of the Arts for over 20 years, and is the recipient of graphic design's most honored awards: The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian National Design Award, and the AIGA Medal. Her book, Morla : Design, published by Letterform Archive, offers insight into her creative process and shares 150 of her studio’s projects in print, branding, packaging, web, and environmental design.

Kathleen’s passion for saving and restoring sight began with her father’s struggle with macular degeneration. Devoting her career to community service, she has been President of That Man May See, foundation for Ophthalmology at UCSF, for the past 15 years. She, the faculty of UCSF Ophthalmology, and the University have attracted over $177 million to construct a new Wayne and Gladys Valley Center for Vision at Mission Bay, which opens in early 2020. In 2005, the Bay Area Association for Fundraising Professionals presented Kathleen with the Hank Rosso Outstanding Fundraising Professional award, which recognized her lifetime commitment to making the world better through nonprofit development. Her parallel passion is letterpress printing and bookbinding. She studies annually at Atelier Alma Charta near Parma, Italy, and works from her studio, Il Pavone Press, in San Francisco.

Kathleen Walkup is a curator, author, and Lovelace Family Professor of Book Art at Mills College, Oakland, California, where she has directed the Book Art Program since 1983. Kathy co-founded Peartree Printers, the first women’s letterpress job shop in San Francisco since the late nineteenth century. Her latest essay on Jane Grabhorn and other twentieth-century women printers is forthcoming from Legacy Press. Transitory Matter: (Mostly) ephemera from the presses of Kathleen Walkup opened at Mills in 2019. In 2022 she will curate an exhibition at San Francisco Center for the Book exploring the origins of artists’ books through the combined lens of gender and race.

Steve Woodall is the collections specialist for artists’ books at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he is heading a project to create greater public and scholarly engagement with the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books. In that capacity he curates exhibitions, produces symposiums, and creates content for media-rich websites. From 2008-2015 he was director of Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Arts, and from 1996-2008 artistic director at the San Francisco Center for the Book.

Robin Wright is the founder and director of RITE Editions. She has produced limited editions by conceptual artists in a variety of mediums since 2007. The most recent RITE Edition publication “Steven Leiber Catalogs” was launched in NYC at Printed Matter in September 2019 and is featured in a related exhibition in the PM galleries in October. She is a long time SFMOMA Board member and has worked on a number of collection and museum expansion initiatives since 1992. Robin is also on the Executive Committee of MoMA’s International Council and the Global Council of the Cleveland Art Museum.